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This bottling plant can hold up to 30 million pounds of honey at a time. But keeping it supplied starts with keeping bees alive. And today that's harder than ever. Oh wow. Bees face a growing number of threats to their survival. About 50% of bee colonies die each year in the US. That affects a lot more than just honey farmers. One in every three bites of food we eat directly benefits from bee pollination. Can you give me a picture of what the inside of a grocery store would look like if we don't keep these bees healthy? Yeah. So, there'd be no color. It would be a pretty bleak place to be going. Yeah. Which is why Sweet Harvest Foods is
betting on artificial intelligence to help keep its honeybees healthy, like these robot hives. So, can AI actually help beekeepers spot trouble earlier, keep colonies healthy, and ultimately get bees to produce more honey? So, we are deep in rural Montana right now, and we've been driving for about 100 miles, and as you can see, there are practically no buildings in sight, if any. But what we do keep seeing are these clusters of beehives kind of spaced all around these hills and fields. So we're going to go see a couple of them today. That's where we met Matt Halgaw whose family has worked with bees since the 1400s. We made it.
Yeah, this is great. Beautiful morning. Bees for some reason they like lighter colors and you know smooth materials. So right now I am their biggest nightmare. I You're a little bit of their enemy for now. How many times would you say you've been stung? Thousands. Thou probably tens of thousands of times. Today, Matt leads Nate's Hives, the nation's largest beekeeper, managing 6 billion bees in hives like these across the country. I think we're ready. At first glance, it's hard to picture a role for AI here until you see what Matt is up against. So, here we'll just warn the bees that were coming. Give them a little bit of We'll just kind of tell them, "Hey, how many bees are in there?"
Oh, at least 60,000 in one. Look at all that honey. That's just a single colony. This yard has 64, each in its own stack of wooden boxes. Keep in mind that a bee in its lifetime can produce about 1 12th of a tablespoon of honey. So, it takes a lot of bees to put honey on the table. Bees only start collecting nectar to produce honey midway through their lives. And a lot can go wrong before a bee ever gets there. things like drought, weather stress, um exposure to pesticides in the landscape. Bees are very complex. You know, they're very
tightly linked to the environments that they are in. Kelly Cohanic studies bee health. If the hut she got, she got me. A typical checkup looks something like this. Kelly and Matt go frame by frame, looking at how evenly the queen bee has laid her eggs. One clue to the colony's health. The queen is so important. She's integral. She's the hub of the wheel. So, as we look at this frame, the queen was very organized. Taps. Oops. Wow. So, each of these frames about 1,000 bees. Yeah. I never thought I'd be holding a thousand bees. But these days, even a busy hive can hide something deadly. A tiny might called feroa.
It's very similar to a tick in humans. It feeds on the bees, but it also vectors viruses to the bees that can be very harmful and detrimental to their health. The might first appeared in the US in the 1980s after bees were imported from overseas. Then it spread quickly states side because these colonies are constantly on the move. Farmers all over America rent the bees to pollinate their crops. A business that accounts for about 50% of a beekeeper's revenue. In January, they get moved to California to pollinate almonds. We send bees to Texas and Florida, and then they come to the Midwest, you know, kind of late spring, early summer. It can be a little
stressful for the hives to be loaded onto the truck and to be moved like that. They can get hot. You know, it can decrease their population a little bit. Nate says it does its best to keep the bees comfortable. If a veroamite gets in, it can wipe out an entire bee colony in a matter of weeks. But when hives are scattered across huge distances, a lot can happen between checkups. By the time a beekeeper returns and sees an obvious problem, it may already be too late. That's where AI could help. And the simplest tool to detect these mites sits on something beekeepers already carry, a smartphone. When you put your phone in there and it
starts listening, what is it hearing that allows it to make the determination? It's hearing much of what we're hearing when we open the hive. We're hearing, you know, the buzzing of the bees. The AI recording tool Nates is testing can detect very subtle changes that a human ear might miss. A healthy queen keeps the hive organized, creating a steadier buzz like this. If she is sick or gone, the bees can become more sporadic. They're a little more confused because they're a little bit lacking direction without a queen. So, there is a unique sound to a queenless hive. The goal with AI is to identify problems earlier on so they can allow us to be a
little bit more predictive and proactive than we've been able to be historically. Where do you see the limits of AI being? There's always going to have to be people involved in order to turn that data into a management practice. So, beekeepers have to make lots of different choices every day, all the time. Another tool they're testing is this robotic hive here. Four bee colonies live inside a single system. About once a week, the machine removes every frame and photographs both sides. AI then searches those images for mites on individual bees.
You know, historically what we've done is you actually have to take a sample of about 300 bees from the hive and you have to physically shake the sample of bees to dislodge the mites from the bees and that's how you kind of count how many mites are in the colony. And that was a slow process too. And so the idea is that the robot can kind of act as a sentry to let us know earlier if the might load is starting to increase so that we can come out to the yard and take care of it. We weren't allowed to disclose the technology powering these hives. I don't think we'll ever get to a place where all the hives look like this. The idea behind this specifically is to have one of these in each yard to sort of act
as a representative for the rest of the hives in the yard. Right now, beekeepers use bees QR codes to log each hive's health over time. Nate's plans to use that data to help breeders raise queens from colonies that are the most resilient and produce the most honey. Right now, the USD averages are about 50 lbs per colony in the United States. 30 years ago, it used to be 85 lbs or so. Can we get that back there? Harvesting starts with beekeepers removing the surplus honey that bees have stored at the top of the hives. From the bey yard, those boxes are trucked into what they call a tempering room. You feel the heat just putting
your arm in. It is hot in here. We want to keep it warm because, as you know, honey is very viscous and so we need the honey to flow out of the comb and into the tank. So, how much honey would do you say? You're going to have to stop and let me count. We can do that. Okay. No, that's totally fine. Okay. 1 2 3 4 5 6. After some calculating, we landed on this being about 100 pallets, each carrying roughly 1,500 lb of honey. So, think about how many bees were involved in making all of the honey in here. Hundreds of thousands. Millions. Millions of bees. I cannot believe that I'm literally just eating it straight from the hive. And this is how good it tastes.
Next, these boxes go into the extraction room. Bees seal each cell of honey with a thin wax cap. That's what this machine gets rid of first. This facility can run through roughly a thousand boxes a day. Across its whole network, Nate's hives can process over 200,000 boxes over a season. We want to work like a beehive. So, if everybody has a job and everybody can do every job, that gives you a lot of respect for your co-workers. Then the frames go into this spinner which uses centrifugal force to pull out the honey. So they're just going non-stop essentially all day. Machines strain out the wax and other debris, but nothing here goes to waste. That is a lot less sticky than I expected.
That's the beeswax. So, don't stick your finger in there, but I'm going to. So, that's hot wax. What are you going to make with this? Most of it will be go to candle making. Some of it will go to cosmetics. Ow, that is wild. That's crazy. The cleaned honey is collected into these 3,300 lb vats. It's almost hard to comprehend how little the honey is manipulated. It's such a fresh product. If your ancestors in the 1400s were to see something like this, what do you think they'd say? And the answer, standing in front of a
vat like this wasn't what I expected. What would be the most intriguing is how little beekeeping has changed since they were doing it. And I think in a way that gives us a connection almost to our past, right? and maybe even to our future that some things never change. Even here, the old rhythm holds. Once all the honey is spun out, these wooden frames head back to the hives to be filled again. For the honey, the journey is just beginning. It's pumped into bulk containers that are trucked hundreds of miles to this bottling plant in Minnesota. The bees are doing the work, right? It is our jobs to protect what the bees have already done.
The 360 square foot facility is operated by Sweet Harvest Foods, which owns Nate's Honey and Hives. It's about the size of six football fields. Robert Denahi has worked for the company for 11 years. Everything you see down the aisles here are honey products. Everything. Everything you see everything that is here. And this only represents about three weeks worth of inventory for us here at Sweet Harvest. No way. It's mindboggling. Honey consumption in the US has doubled, almost doubled in the last 10 years, and consumers just can't seem to get enough of it.
Today, only about 20% of the honey consumed in the US is produced domestically. What we're going to do now is travel down our international highway of honey transport. That's what I call this lane. Is there like a reason for the different colors like the red, blue, black? I love that you asked that question. Often it is a different country of origin coming through. So it takes the world, right? So we have a relationship to the globe and we work in harmony with all the different countries that are extracting honey. One thing that a lot of individuals may not understand about honey is it's in everything. It's not just in food. It's in makeup. It's in medications. But before any of this
honey reaches consumers, the company needs to know exactly what's inside it. Samples are tested for pesticides, antibiotics, pollen, and any ingredient that would compromise the honey's purity. Every single load gets tested without fail. This isn't a trust us, we're doing the right thing. If anyone were ever to come in here and pull a sample of honey and say, "Hey, I think something's going on here." we can open up an independent third party labs test and say this is what's going on or this is how it tested. Once it passes the checks, the honey can move into processing. So, we walked in and it's real like you feel how the temperature went up. It is really hot in here.
Yes, honey is naturally crystallizing as it ages. So, it becomes incredibly difficult to handle to keep it runny. It's 90° in here. We're going to be kneading these. Yeah, we're coming. Yeah, it's a little warmer in here, is it not? It is a recipe for success. Then batches get blended together inside an oven that's bigger than a New York studio apartment. Yeah, you can probably fit a couple of them in there, to be honest. Yes. No two batches taste or look exactly the same. Once the honey is poured in here, a special software system checks its flavor and color, then recommends which
of these giant tanks it should go into to keep the blend consistent. We don't want all of this hard work up till now to be jeopardized because of human error. So machines are less likely to make mistakes in this context than people. Absolutely. For advanced tech allows us to be consistent. Just one of these tanks holds about 70,000 lbs of honey. That'll make 70,000 16oz bottles. Wild. And this entire tank is going to get bottled today. We can ultimately select the filling line that we're transferring to. And what's really neat about this system is it'll tell us which travel path our honey is taking.
It's like a little honey GPS system. Exactly. Do you ever like just nerd out over this? I geek out all day. I mean, I this is my pride and joy. Many producers heat their honey a lot to help it flow through these pipes and into bottles, but Nates keeps its honey raw, limiting the heat to preserve the natural enzymes. And at the bottling line, that comes with a tradeoff. So, in terms of how fast the bottles get filled, right, for raw honey, is that slower? I love that you asked that question. Yes. So, for raw honey, it is naturally cooler product, which then becomes more viscous, right? It's
thicker. So, it does take longer for us to produce that. Let me grab a bottle here. Every 30 minutes, workers pull bottles from the line to check temperature and make sure the honey isn't being overheated. And it takes about 10 seconds before you know where you're at for a total temperature. The product is very precious to us. We hold it just like we would our own children, right? It's precious. You want to ensure that this product gets into the bottle and gets into the bottle correctly the first time. This line is bottling organic. To qualify as that, the hives supplying this honey need miles of wild or organic farmland around them to limit pesticide exposure. But that's so hard to find in the continental US that Nates
and all other American honey processors need to source it from overseas. Then label where it comes from. India, Brazil, Mexico. So this will never say United States. USA does not create organic product. That is so crazy to me. Still, I think that's probably been the most shocking part of this entire experience. From there, the finished bottles are packed up and moved into the warehouse. It looks like it just disappears. And if you want to look through this window, you'll actually see the robot hard at work. That gives Terminator vibes.
Absolutely. It's not as scary as the Terminator. It's here to help us. There's one more way AI could help beekeepers in the future, and it takes us back to the very beginning of the process. Sweet Harvest and Nates are exploring how AI could help decide where to put honeybees in the first place. Right now, beekeepers consider weather, historical performance, and what they can see around a potential beyard. And so, this board attempts to do those things and works as sort of a scratch pad, if you will, or a whiteboard for us. But in the future, satellite imagery analyzed by AI could identify major nectar sources like clover, alalfa, and canola, then determine whether those plants are actually blooming. It could even help identify areas that may be more
vulnerable to pests. And so we want to track all of that. And we'll be able to plug technology in with near real-time satellite data. It's not going to be a perfect solution, but if you can do it in advance and identify the yards you think are going to be most productive, it saves you cost. It gives you better yields. For now, the final decision still rests with the beekeepers. If bees could talk to us, what do you think they would tell us about their experience today versus their experience maybe like 10 years ago? H I hope that they would ask us why have you not solved the problem of honeybee
mortality? If a cattle rancher walks out into the field and sees half of his cattle dead in the field, it's shocking. It's sad. It's devastating. Bee lovers like Matt and Kelly hope AI may be part of the solution. And the stakes go far beyond honey. No bees, no life. Because you feel the bees disappear, it's hard to live the life. They have a very, very fragrant smell. You can imagine that if you smelled that, a bee would just want to eat it up.
